Tag Archives: Jonathan Moon

I have been a lifelong aficionado of anthologies. I love reading a story or two before turning in for the night or during my lunch break. As such, I was anxious to read Darkness Ad Infinitum upon its release. The cover is gorgeous and I had heard good things about Villipede. So when I received a copy, I hoped for a jaw-dropping array of dark and scary fiction. I got that. Almost.

The collection opens with “Longboat,” by Becky Regalado, and while it is very well written, it is one of the Mobius strip kind of tales. You know the ones, where the end is the same as the beginning and you find that the story plays on an infinite loop. Those annoy me. I would have easily forgiven this, were it not for the fact that there are a few other “loopy” tales in this collection. Still, I did enjoy her story. The imagery is superb.

I’ll just touch on the ones that really won me over. Adam Millard’s “In the Walls” is a tale of Lovecraftian terrors lurking behind the sheetrock, and it’s a good one. Being a longtime fan of Golem tales, I dug “Earth Risen,” by Pete Clark. “The Westhoff Version,” by Patrick O’Neill, reminded me of a nastier Roald Dahl, full of subtle menace and shadowy ick. John McCaffrey’s “Brannigan’s Window” was wonderful, a very strong tale of renovation and eviction.

Jonathan Moon’s “Hungry As the Wind” is a blast of a tale about bounty hunters and their ill-fated venture into haunted woods. David Dunwoody turns in one of the weirdest tales, “The Good Man,” which opens on the aftermath of a robbery and takes sharp turns into nightmare territory with vampiric beings and redemption dancing cheek to cheek. “The Undertaker’s Melancholy” is a sprawling, crawling prose piece by Sydney Leigh. The words are gorgeous and bite with tiny teeth.

Most of these stories were well written, I just found that many had a “been there many times” feel. I had hoped for a collection of darkly strange and unsettlingly surreal tales, and while there are some of those in here, I wished for more. That being said, it is a gorgeous thing to behold, visually stunning. Each story is accompanied with an illustration, the cover art by Wednesday Wolf is amazing, and the overall layout and execution is just as beautiful. There is a lot of wonderful work in here, and just because it failed to register on the WOW-o-meter, it doesn’t mean it won’t with you.